IIt is difficult to imagine the void left by the sudden death of Daniel Cohen. Because it’s just as hard to overstate the influence this genius smuggler has had on so many generations of French economists. Obviously as a researcher, as a teacher and above all as an intellectual, but also as a tireless creator and animator of institutions for social science research in France and Europe. The success of a certain school, of a will handle French economy owes him immensely.
Many of us owe Daniel Cohen the opportunity to become economists, and I would like to briefly recount the incredible opportunity we were given to be able to have him as a teacher. For that, you have to start with this scene that I know many others have experienced, in one form or another. For me, it was the first economics seminar at the Ecole Normale Supérieure (ENS). You have to imagine the teenagers that we were, vaguely insolent in our intellectual pretensions but frankly uneducated, not too sure of what we wanted to do in life, five or six, no more, enter in this small room where Daniel Cohen was waiting for us.
And there, the show can begin: two thousand years of economic development told in thirty minutes, two hundred years of history of the economic theories in the thirty minutes which follow. It summons Malthus, Schumpeter or Robert Lucas, but also Jankélévitch, Koyré and Proust! The hands are agitated, the flow of machine-gun, the voice which leaves in acute. The mind and the body jump like a goat, from one idea to another, from the chair to the blackboard, to derive three equations, it’s all there, brilliant intuition. It goes fast, very fast! But everything seems clear and new. Original and rigorous. The world suddenly becomes denser. Economics, a dismal science of which we only knew models from arid textbooks, suddenly took on flesh. And this style! Because Daniel Cohen really had an intellect of a mad class. A real panache. It was joyful, exciting. Without knowing it, you had just hit it off with Charon, you had already crossed over to the other side: impossible not to want to pursue this quest for gay knowledge with him!
A radical humanism
By his intelligence and his culture, by his unequaled talents as a teacher, Daniel Cohen inspired us with incredible admiration and great deference. But that without any of the trappings of the academic potentate. Because he was endearing, accessible, and funny. I’m not betraying anyone by saying that we all had a lot of fun imitating him. Daniel radiated with his benevolence: he welcomed us, in a real companionship. Because what he transmitted, it was not his Weltanschauung [conception du monde]but a certain idea of knowledge.
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